A new community resource, built on top of the excellent Composer and Packagist technology that's popular in today's PHP development world, has been released and provides more context about libraries and provides a "rank" for each one - PHPPackages.org.

PHPPackages.org was built to solve the following problems: [it] defines popularity rank for php packages, provide a space for discussion and [helps to] discover which packages use a specific package.

The About page has more information about the site, how they calculate the "popularity" metric, what the various icons mean and what kinds of things you can do on the site. It's a great resource, especially for those wondering who is using their packages and to discover new packages that are more widely used. It has a lot of the same information that the Packagist site contains but that little extra bit of data is quite useful.

In a new post to the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorcshares the results of the PHP framework survey the site posted a month back. In it they asked developers for their opinions on favorite frameworks (not necessarily the one they use, but their own personal opinion). For anyone that's been keeping up with the current state of PHP frameworks, the results aren't all that surprising though.

One month ago, we started the annual SitePoint framework popularity survey. Now that the month has expired, it’s time to look at the results and to distribute the prizes. The response was a whopping ~7800 entries, far more than any other survey we’ve held so far, and even after filtering out invalid entries we end up with a formidable number of valid participants.

According to the results the most popular framework, by far, was Laravel. Coming in second was Symfony2 and third the Nette framework. They did ask for different opinions for personal versus business choices but the results track the same between the two. He also splits out the data into the top results by country and by the age of the people who responded.

He finishes off the post with some of his own thoughts on why Laravel was the clear winner with only some of it having to do with the framework itself. He points out the related projects, "near perfect documentation" and other things (like Laravel's own subreddit). He suggests that, even though open source and "free" tend to go together, spending money and a good amount of time on a project can help ensure it succeeds. He also offers some practical advice for those wanting to give their project a boost:

Spread the word, analyze solutions from other people, discuss them. Be open, be transparent. Have an official blog, get a StackOverflow tag, justify your decisions, get in touch with popular publications which can help promote your framework if you present it well enough.

The survey will run for a month and there's some prizes involved for the top "resharers" of the survey. You can submit your own votes directly through the post at the bottom. Questions range from which framework you prefer to which you use at your place of employment and why each was chosen. Submit your answers today and help get a better idea of the PHP framework landscape.

On the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc has posted what could be "best PHP frameworks for 2014". The results were compiled from the feedback of a survey they recently took during the past week.

We asked these questions to decide which frameworks deserve our attention in 2014 the most. The prerequisite for participation was merely having experience in more than one framework, seeing as it's pointless to ask someone what their favorite bar was if they've only drunk in one place.

In the end, the results showed some interesting trends in the choice of PHP framework and their overall popularity. The three topping the popularity charts were (in this order) Laravel, Phalcon then Symfony2. Other mainstay frameworks like Zend Framework, Yii and CodeIgniter were ranked lower in the list. He goes through the results and provides a bit of background on the feedback, including how much of the original data had to be filtered out for one reason or another. He also includes a list of "noteworthy answers" from various folks responding to the survey. His personal choice? Phalcon because of it's overall performance and the community around it.

So which framework seems most promising for 2014? Which should you switch to in the new year? Is it worth it? That's entirely up to you – as always, it depends on your comfort level, the project requirements, and time you have to study new things.

On PHPClasses.org today there's a new post from Manuel Lemos suggesting that one of the main reasons why PHP is popular is because of WordPress, not the frameworks that have been built with it.

Recently the Tiobe Index of published an update of their programming language index on which they claim PHP has been raising in popularity due to Zend Framework 2 but they do not justify why. Read this article to learn about an opinion why this claim is unfounded and PHP popularity has more to do with WordPress than with PHP at one language may be more popular than PHP Frameworks.

In the post he talks some about the TIOBE index, how it ranks popularity and where PHP currently sits on the list. He then lists out seven reasons why he thinks that WordPress made PHP as popular as it is including:

WordPress is the Most Popular PHP Application

WordPress alone is much more popular than any PHP framework

The Extensible WordPress plugin ecosystem

Non-Programmers develop in PHP just because of WordPress

He also suggests that the popularity of WordPress stems from it solving a more pragmatic problem than PHP frameworks

According to this new post on the Pixelstech site, PHP is "making a comeback" with an increase in popularity since it was last measured on the TIOBE index.

TIOBE released the programming language index for July 2013. The highlight of this month is that PHP is coming back. It ranks the fifth and has an increase of 1.54% compared to January. There are no changes in the ranking for the top 4 languages. The reason why PHP is back may be attributed to the new PHP Zend Framework that was released in September 2012, but this reason is not very convincing.

The post includes the list of the top twenty languages ordered by popularity with C, Java, Objective-C and C++ coming in at the four spots above PHP now.

Adam Culp has posted his own look at some of the PHP usage statistics that are out there and how they can be interpreted.

Every once in awhile I stumble across someone who is trying to find their way and decide what they will do in their career. As the organizer of a PHP user group I see many new developers passing through. Of course I always speak of how strong PHP is in the web markets, and encourage new web developers to pursue PHP as a tool in their box of goodies. Because as a web developer it would be a career limiting move to not have any knowledge of PHP. Here is why...

He shares a few different sources including w3tech's overall and PHP-specific information (PHP5 specific here) and the current results of the TIOBE index showing language popularity. For each he talks some about what the results mean (and don't mean) and how, if you're a "professional developer" you should, at the least, know PHP - the most dominant language in the web space.

On the ZFort Group's site today there's a new post sharing an infrographic about frameworks in PHP. The data was gathered from Google Trends and looks at popularity and provides some detail for each.

There is a great deal of frameworks, PHP ones in particular, fighting for developers attention. Zfort Group is an interested party in terms of choosing the best PHP frameworks for our custom PHP projects and internal ones as well. So we are continually investigating trends, developers' voting, forums, reviews, ratings, etc. We collected unique and very interesting information and it could be really helpful to the PHP community.

They pulled in some data from othersources as well. It's interesting to see which of the options came out highest in the numbers. They looked at trends for Yii, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, CakePHP and Symfony. They detail some of the features of each framework including the required PHP version, complexity and quality of community/documentation.

In this new post to his Drupal Motion site, David Corbacho shares some statistics about why PHP "isn't dead yet" and that despite the slow adoption of the latest versions of the language, it's still as popular as it ever was.

This is a follow-up on the article Dries Buytaert wrote in 2007 PHP is dead... long live PHP!. In the article he shared same concern that Nick Lewis for the slow adoption rate of PHP 5, less than 20% at that time. And he encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5. [...] Well, PHP 5 adoption rate is 96.9%, and PHP 4 is quite dead. Mission accomplished. Let's have a look to the overall PHP health.

He shares data from a few sources about the popularity and adoption of PHP in applications/sites all across the web. Sources include Netcraft survey results, W3Tech usage summaries and Stack Overflow tagging matches (complete with graphs of each set of data).

Kenny Katzgrau has a new post with the top ten Sparks (CodeIgniter packages) for the year of 2011:

It’s a moderately simple app that provides a vehicle for quickly dropping other developers’ code in your codebase. Many of the packages on GetSparks are very well maintained. I am continually impressed by the amount of effort spark developers pour into their submissions when I peruse the site and try new packages out. [...] GetSparks has almost clocked 50,000 package downloads at this point, but there are handful of sparks that have really stood out in terms of popularity.